NINDS Neuroscience Funding Announcements

This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) issued by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) solicits grant applications from institutions/ organizations that propose to establish a genome-wide association study consortium focused on the goal of identifying genes that influence the risk and outcome of ischemic stroke. The NINDS will support one such multi-center consortium. This project will create a permanent global resource, via the Database of Genotype and Phenotype (dbGAP), of genotyping data of rigorously phenotyped ischemic stroke cases. The proposed study should concentrate on using existing DNA sample sets. Each application submitted in response to this FOA must include plans to establish: (i) a Data Coordinating Center (DCC) and (ii) Genetic Research Centers (GRC) that together would be able to make available a sufficient number of genotyped and uniformly phenotyped samples to provide statistical power for a meaningful GWAS analysis (6,000 or more samples is an estimate of an appropriate sample size). The Consortium should develop standardized, validated, and easily replicated methods to assign stroke subtypes for this GWAS analysis. The samples submitted for this GWAS should be accompanied by clinical data to support the endophenotyping in this study and more importantly, to enable the utilization of the data from these study in future subtype-specific studies. The goal of this announcement is not only to enable an initial exploration of genes that affect susceptibility and outcome, but also to create a national resource of high quality information for data mining, replication studies, and future hypothesis generation.